Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List

with Correspondent No 38

24.1.2002

Hi,

You wrote in regard to a post I sent to Gary –

To Gary: As you might have gathered by now, I have abandoned any hope for Humanity as it simply keeps going around in circles, endlessly re-running the tried and failed methods, ideals and beliefs. The next generation frantically digs through the trash bin of history, looks for something that feels good or seems right, dusts it off, blindly ignores all of the evidence of the past failures, forms a group around a charismatic leader and starts to passionately fight the good fight. Enough is enough. <snip> So, in a bid to rope in this rave and wrap it up, the two thoughts that occurred to me was the futility of Humanity’s search for peace by persisting with the long-tried and always-failed methods and how this contrasts with the radical new approach – the do-it-yourself method.

If all else fails, which it clearly is – take unilateral action. Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

I might suggest that if it were so easy then there would be peace on earth by now. The problem up until now is the instinctual notion of ‘we’ – the passionate bond that ties human beings together ensures that ‘we’ either sink together or tread water together. As such, ‘we’ will always get it wrong and the only way out of the mess is for individual members of the species to take unilateral action – to lead by practical example, to prove that it is possible to become actually free of malice and sorrow.

The process of spiritual awareness is totally locked into and fixated with spiritualism. A thorough examination of the process of spiritual awareness will reveal it is a process unabashedly aimed at self-aggrandizing. Why else do those who succeed on the spiritual search end up feeling God-realized or God-like or a God or Goddess? So-called spiritual awareness is in fact a compulsive restriction of awareness in that sensate experience is avoided and sensible thinking is denied. Nowhere is this more obvious than those who sit in the lotus position meditating – retreating from the world of the senses, indulging in imaginary ‘inner’ fantasies and yet claiming they are being here.

The actualism method is not a refinement of the spiritual process of self-aggrandizement – the actualism process of ‘self’-awareness is the aimed diametrically opposite – at self-immolation. Or, to put it another way – the spiritual method aims to blow the balloon up, actualism aims to pop it.

When I came across actualism, I really didn’t have any other options. I knew by experience that the real world sucked and I also knew by experience that the spiritual world was a wank. That’s why I started, for the first time in my life, to become really interested in being here – and in asking myself how I was experiencing this moment of being alive, this the only moment that I can actually experience. What naturally followed from this was the deliberate decision to make becoming happy and harmless my numero uno goal in life – not number six, not number three, but number one.

Only by doing this is success in becoming happy and harmless guaranteed.

Gary – The only other thing I would mention is that there is another easy way of understanding the nature of the animal instinctual programming that I have run across and that is to observe children. Granted that the children that I work with as a social worker have, in many cases, been horribly abused by their parents and caretakers, but they seem not to have developed the internal controls that are inculcated by society as morals, ethics, and values, and the underlying instinctual package is plain for all to see. The malice and sorrow of these little people, their fights with one another, their pain and suffering, is readily apparent. The children are very obviously in a primitive survival mode almost all the time. The destructiveness of these self-centred passions is something I wrestle with everyday in my work.

Having had children myself and watched others, it is readily apparent that fear, aggression, nurture and desire are instinctual passions and not something that is taught or picked up from others or one’s environment. Chinese anger is the same as African anger and Australian anger. As for the nature vs. nurture debate – the instinctual passions are ‘natural’ in that they are genetically encoded and ‘nurture’ plays a minor role in the degree and manner of suppression or expression of these passions. Even then, the role of ‘nurture’ in the suppression and control of the instinctual passions is by no means certain as innate differences can be readily observed in very young children even with identical upbringing.

Gary – There is another thing about nurture, aside from the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate. There seems to be a feeling among those who I am going to dub ‘nurturists’ that if only enough nurture is supplied to each and every human being, the problems of humanity will be solved and there will no wars, no violence, etc. It’s the old ‘what the world needs now is Love Sweet Love’ syndrome, and it is strong among those who are positive, nurturing types. Obviously children need a great deal of nurturing, and I am not suggesting to stop nurturing them. But nurture does not eliminate the genetically encoded instinctual passions of aggression and fear.

That love fails, and always has failed, can be seen in the bitter-sweet sadness of love songs and the tragedies and melodramas that pass for great love stories. Only in the fairy stories do people live happily ever after and only in mythology do loving societies exist. My experience is when the instinctual passion of nurture kicks in with regard to caring for children, it invariably triggers off the full range of associated instinctual passions. Fear abounds in protecting and providing, aggression kicks in the form of jealousy and possessiveness and desire simply changes focus from sexual hunting to nest-building security, both of which are pursued relentlessly. Exactly as love always fails, the instinctual passion of nurture also fails to deliver the goods for the simple reason that it is impossible to separate the good from the bad in the intertwined package of instinctual passions.  Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

The whole point of actualism is to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. It’s not about changing your wife or husband, your children, your boss, your neighbour or your living circumstances. It’s not about changing the morals or ethics or the social, political, educational or legal systems of the world. It’s not about stopping other people fighting or feuding, nor is it about saving or salving other people. Actualism is not about changing others – it’s about taking unilateral action and changing yourself, radically and irrevocably.

*

To Gary: Last year I found myself designing a house that was completely foreign to what I would normally consider my style and yet I did the job I was paid to do without a glimmer of resentment or frustration. I did the best I could to give the client what she wanted in the way of style and used my experience and knowledge to ensure that she got best practical value for her money. It was a liberating exercise for me, for not only had I broken free of the values imposed by my vocational training but also of the belief that there is an intrinsic and absolute beauty. As there was no conflict at all between the client and myself, everyone won out of the situation.  Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

There is ample evidence that everyone has experienced brief one-off experiences of perfection and purity, where there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ present to muck things up. These experiences are commonly called peak experiences although Richard has used the more descriptive term pure consciousness experience (PCE) so as to distinguish these brief moments of ‘self’-lessness from the spiritually-polluted, totally-affective, entirely-imaginary altered states of consciousness (ASC) where an aggrandized ‘self’ claims the experience for his or her own glory.

However, my story was not told as a moral or ethical tale or an instance of wisdom such as the psittacism that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. The story I told was a practical example of the actualism method in action and as such the example falls into the reward-for-effort category. I did not miraculously have a temporary experience of being in the flow – what I was talking about was a pragmatic result of some four years of constantly working on eliminating malice and sorrow from my life. I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless and one of the reoccurring times when I was not harmless was in occasional uncomfortable, difficult or even antagonistic interactions with my clients.

What I eventually tracked these feelings down to was that I had been programmed to regard beauty as an absolute value – something that ‘I’ thought and felt was worth fighting for or worth defending. When I saw that this old program stood in the way of harmonious interactions with my fellow human beings, it was clearly time to eradicate it from my life.

The result of this process was not a moral or ethical decision made based on what I should or shouldn’t do, or what was the right thing to do or what was wrong the wrong thing to do, because this would only mean that I was suppressing the feeling – in other words, kidding myself. The end result of this process was the experiential understanding that maintaining this old piece of programming would mean I was not harmless, and because being harmless is my numero uno goal in life, there was no way I could sustain the ideal or the passion-backed feeling of beauty.

The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

*

To Gary: I’ve noticed I’ve gotten into what could be described as a story telling mode, but my experience is that I have gleaned as much information from listening to Richard’s down-to-earth stories as I have from listening to or reading his Journal and his correspondence. In hindsight, the process of actualism for me firstly involved backtracking out of that great fantasy diversion that all seekers of freedom and peace have traditionally made – the spiritual path. Having got out of that mess, I then found myself back where I left off before I went up that track – making sense of and becoming free of the real-world. I had done a bit of it in my time before I became a spiritualist but I was emboldened and encouraged by Richard’s discovery to go all the way.

I guess that’s why I am writing more about day-to-day down-to-earth ‘real’-word issues with you, because once I got my head out of the spiritual clouds, these are what became my fascination. Peter to Gary, 20.1.2002

I don’t know what you mean by a ‘non-linear mechanism of information’. When I re-read my story, I thought it was reasonably straightforward but maybe the further explanation I gave will be of help in understanding it. I’m not trotting out a spiritual-type wisdom, spinning a mythical yarn or recounting moral tale – I told the story in order to relate my down-to-earth experiences of applying the actualism method to a fellow human being.

Spiritual teachings, both Eastern and Western, are awash with fairy-tale stories of mythical God-like figures and these fairy stories have been passed down and embellished over millennia. The whole point of spiritual stories is that they convey an affective feeling and not that they make intellectual sense, are factual or even relate to actual flesh and blood human beings.

I too am no fan of intellectual discourses but discussing and thinking about an issue in order to make sense of it is another matter entirely. It can take a good deal of effort to break the habits of spiritual indoctrination of thoughtless faithful acceptance – the ingrained ‘socio-cultural-language’ program as you called it – and to start to re-engage one’s brain and learn to think again.

If you take away the socio-cultural-language programming that disparages intellectual discourse you may well find a wealth of information in discussions on this list as well as on the AF website that will both facilitate a bare awareness and encourage clear thinking. Only by becoming aware of, and then making sense of, one’s own social and instinctual programming can one ever become free of the human condition.

27.1.2002

I might suggest that if it were so easy then there would be peace on earth by now. The problem up until now is the instinctual notion of ‘we’ – the passionate bond that ties human beings together ensures that ‘we’ either sink together or tread water together. As such, ‘we’ will always get it wrong and the only way out of the mess is for individual members of the species to take unilateral action – to lead by practical example, to prove that it is possible to become actually free of malice and sorrow.

I had similar problems with words when I first came across actualism. I started to become aware how loose I was in the meaning of words but that this was generally the case in any discussions about freedom. I realized that it suited me not to question too deeply what was being said because the freedom I was seeking was a feeling-only, other-worldly experience and not a sensate-only down-to-earth experience. After writing my journal, I set about writing a glossary of common terms used in actualism, giving their dictionary definitions and an explanation of the difference between the word’s actual meaning and its varied and confusing spiritual meanings.

Yep. Those who challenged the status quo of beliefs with the empirical discovery of the actuality of the situation – in other words the facts – often had a hard time of it and Galileo’s treatment stands out as a classic example. Richard’s discovery that it is possible to become free of instinctual malice and sorrow, be it virtually or actually, is still in its infancy but there will come a stage when it becomes more widely known and the opposition will possibly become organized and institutionalized. However, the internet offers a wonderfully subversive means of dissipating this discovery and it is hard to see that censorship will thwart this.

I also remember passing through a phase where I imagined all sorts of retribution would be heaped upon me for being a heretic but the fears eventually wore themselves out in the face of the long-sought-after realization of peace on earth. Simultaneously I also realized that as the process took hold my whole drive to teach others started to collapse and I began to realize that rather than becoming rich and famous, I was also becoming increasingly autonomous and anonymous.

There is an inherent safety in focussing all of one’s attention on changing oneself and not others.

*

I did not set out to become free of beauty, I set out to become happy and harmless ... <snip> The other discovery that happened when the feeling of beauty collapsed was that the feeling of ugliness collapsed along with it and as a consequence even more of the magic of actuality became apparent in my daily life.

I don’t, for if I appreciated beauty there would be an equal part of the world of people, things and events that I disparaged, loathed and hated for being ugly. What I discovered was that by affectively classifying things as beautiful or ugly, I automatically missed out on the opportunity of clearly seeing the actuality of this peerless universe. The other aspect that I discovered early on in the process of actualism was that desperately holding on to any of the morals, ethics or values I had been taught to be truths only prevented me from experientially understanding the full scope of the human condition and how it operates in this flesh and blood body.

The whole process of eliminating the affective division of beauty/ugliness from my life started with an intellectual understanding and proceeded experientially as I became aware of how certain aspects of my feelings and emotions interfered with me being happy and harmless. From memory, the first and most obvious aspect was the common-to-all habit of classifying the weather as beautiful or terrible. I quickly saw how my mood was influenced by ‘my’ liking or disliking a fact. This meant that if I woke up in the morning and didn’t like the weather, I had started the day feeling grumpy. It took me only a few days of being aware of these habitual feelings to see how senseless it was to rile against a fact and how it prevented me from being happy and harmless because a grumpy person can never be harmless.

*

I don’t know what you mean by a ‘non-linear mechanism of information’.

My experience was that it took a great deal of conscious effort to take my social-cultural-spiritual bias out of language such that I was able to understand the written words that are used to convey the process of becoming free of the human condition. It is common to all spiritual teachings to disparage the written word as a means of communication and to encourage affective feeling-only communications such as satsang, communal prayers and meditations and the like. To describe a room full of people sitting silently with their eyes closed as communicating with each other is clearly nonsense. What in fact they are doing is retreating from the trials and tribulations of communicating with their fellow human beings and imagining a world where ‘we are all one’. Seventeen years on the spiritual path was sufficient experience for me to notice that spiritual beings were just as lost, lonely, frightened and cunning as real-world beings. The myth of peace and harmony between spiritual beings is just that – a myth.

Personally, when I met Richard’s discovery, I found it refreshing to come across a clear no-nonsense description of the human condition together with a coherent description of how to become free of it – and all of it written in dictionary definition words that said what it meant and meant what it said. It was a refreshing and radical change from the spiritual teachings I had followed for all those years.

But again, breaking free of my spiritual conditioning did take a while. I remember, after many months of listening to Richard, I was so fascinated by actualism that I wanted to know what was the hidden secret behind it all. If it meant Richard had come from another planet and a spacecraft was going to land and take us away, then I was in to it. It seems so silly now but I was so spiritually indoctrinated that the word was not the thing and that there was a secret message behind the words that I could not conceive that someone would have the audacity to not only say what he means but to mean what he says.

There is no secret message behind the words of actualism for it unabashedly points to an experience that everybody has had in there lives – a pure consciousness experience – and it explains the very simple, but at first difficult to put into operation, method of achieving that same tangible pure consciousness experience of freedom from the human condition, 24 hrs. a day, every day.

I might just end with a tip for beginners and that is to start the method of becoming attentive by focussing on obvious things and good examples are being grumpy about the weather, being upset about the traffic or being annoyed by what someone else says or does. This way you become used to becoming aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and begin to notice what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless right now.

30.1.2002

Easy is clearly not the right word. Obvious would probably be more suitable. I do have to watch my word selection in this list. ‘We’ cling to our instincts with an iron grip.

I had similar problems with words when I first came across actualism. I started to become aware how loose I was in the meaning of words but that this was generally the case in any discussions about freedom. I realized that it suited me not to question too deeply what was being said because the freedom I was seeking was a feeling-only, other-worldly experience and not a sensate-only down-to-earth experience. After writing my journal, I set about writing a glossary of common terms used in actualism, giving their dictionary definitions and an explanation of the difference between the word’s actual meaning and its varied and confusing spiritual meanings.

Not to mention that other traditional spiritual teaching – the-word-is-not-the-thing. I remember having a conversation with an ardent spiritualist in my lounge room one day and he started down the spiritual line that matter does not exist and that only spirit or energy exists. I picked up a coffee cup and said ‘Are you telling me this coffee cup doesn’t exist?’ He said something like – ‘That’s the word coffee cup, not the thing’ to which I replied ‘No, that’s the thing we call a coffee cup’. He looked at me bewildered for a second because he almost started to consider that the coffee cup might be actual, i.e. existing in fact, in this case made of the material stuff of the earth, exactly like he and I. He quickly continued on with his particular spiritual party line for a bit until I pointed to the television set and asked him what he would call that? ‘God’ he replied and the conversation was all down hill from then on.

Whereas in actualism it is not only vitally important to become aware of which feelings are preventing you from becoming happy and harmless but also to name the feeling in exact words. This can be quite difficult for men who in all societies have been taught to repress their feelings and particularly so for spiritual men who further imagine they have transcended their undesirable feelings and as such tend to be dismissive of the actualism process.

I remember when I came across actualism I saw it as the ‘get down and get dirty’ business of exploring my psyche in action as opposed to wandering around with my head in the clouds as I did for much of my spiritual years.

Yep. There has up until now been only two alternatives available for men. Be a ‘real’ man or become a sensitive new age guy, a SNAG. I tried both alternatives and found both to be unsatisfactory. The third alternative was to investigate my social and instinctual programming that entrapped me into having to play one or other of these male roles.

Perhaps a definition of pragmatism might be useful at this point –

Pragmatic – Practical considerations as opp. to theoretical or idealistic ones. Oxford Talking Dictionary

And yet even those who have a professional training or occupation that is reasonably pragmatic still believe in the spiritual fairy tales of good and evil spirits and an other-than-physical world, they still value feelings more than common sense and still look to the dim dark past for answers to the current on-going crisis they call ‘my life’.

When I came across actualism, I adopted a pragmatic approach to ‘my life’. The first step was to acknowledge that I was neither happy and, equally importantly, nor was I harmless despite my best efforts. By the simple act of acknowledging I had a problem, and that I caused problem for others, I was also acknowledging that whatever I had been doing up until then wasn’t working to fix my problems. Then it was relatively easy to backtrack out of the spiritual world, abandon all that I had been doing wrong up until then, start to shed all of the beliefs I had taken as truths and start off down a fresh track.

*

I don’t, for if I appreciated beauty there would be an equal part of the world of people, things and events that I disparaged, loathed and hated for being ugly. What I discovered was that by affectively classifying things as beautiful or ugly, I automatically missed out on the opportunity of clearly seeing the actuality of this peerless universe. The other aspect that I discovered early on in the process of actualism was that desperately holding on to any of the morals, ethics or values I had been taught to be truths only prevented me from experientially understanding the full scope of the human condition and how it operates in this flesh and blood body.

The whole process of eliminating the affective division of beauty/ugliness from my life started with an intellectual understanding and proceeded experientially as I became aware of how certain aspects of my feelings and emotions interfered with me being happy and harmless. From memory, the first and most obvious aspect was the common-to-all habit of classifying the weather as beautiful or terrible. I quickly saw how my mood was influenced by ‘my’ liking or disliking a fact. This meant that if I woke up in the morning and didn’t like the weather, I had started the day feeling grumpy. It took me only a few days of being aware of these habitual feelings to see how senseless it was to rile against a fact and how it prevented me from being happy and harmless because a grumpy person can never be harmless.

I have lived in cold climates as well as in the tropics and found that I prefer the subtropics. Which is not to say that if I lived in another climate zone that I would waste this moment by objecting to, or complaining about, a fact.

When I was in Europe in my twenties I visited a number of galleries and saw an eclectic cross section of what is regarded as great art. What stands out in my memory was visiting the Louvre, I think it was, and being impressed by Monet’s huge painting of waterlilies on a pond. I was fascinated that what looked up close to be a mess of paint became at a distance a delightful image of a lily pond full of light and colour. The other memory is of visiting the Van Gough gallery in Amsterdam and looking at his note books and seeing the amount of sketches and studies that went into what appeared to be the spontaneous paintings hanging in the gallery proper. I also remember that much of the old art looked old – it was dark, stiff, formal and often religious in subject matter. I could only guess that my reaction now would be as it was at first seeing.

*

I might just end with a tip for beginners and that is to start becoming accustomed to attentiveness by focussing on obvious things and good examples are being grumpy about the weather, being upset about the traffic or being annoyed by what other people say or do. In this way you become used to making a habit of being aware of how you are experiencing this moment of being alive and you begin to notice what it is that is preventing you from being happy and harmless right now.

The ‘what to do next’ for me was to make becoming happy and harmless the most important thing in my life. This gave my life meaning for the first time and meant that what to do next was always clear. The only question that then remained was how long I was willing to stand in the way of doing what was obvious.

In the end the proposition of being a pioneer in this brand-new business of becoming free of malice and sorrow stood out as being the most worthy of objectives on the planet right now.

The appropriate action would be the same appropriate action that was recently taken by some of the world’s armies to put an end to the genocide that was happening in the Balkans. The only reason there is not mayhem and lawlessness in the country I am currently living in is because it has an armed police force prepared to do whatever is necessary to stop outbreaks of murder or genocide. Law and order is only maintained at the point of a gun and history has amply proven that the only way to stop outbreaks of violence by one tribe or group or gang is to send armed police or armies in to stop the violence.

Pacifism is an idealistic, ‘if only someone would wave a magic wand’ head-in-the-clouds communal dreaming whereas actualism offers a pragmatic individualistic method for eliminating malice and sorrow – which is only applicable if you are interested in becoming free of malice and sorrow.

The only way thus far known is by asking himself or herself ‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Whilst becoming progressively free of malicious and sorrowful feelings would in no way change the inmate’s physical suffering, at least it would have the effect of relieving them of their emotional suffering.

Or, to use a more everyday example that you could perhaps relate to more readily – if a person is physically ill that is one thing but to then emotionally suffer on top of the illness only serves to mightily and unnecessarily compound the situation, both for the person who is physically suffering and for those he or she interacts with.

As a side response, I recently wrote to Gary on the subject of the ideal of pacifism and you may have missed the post. You will find it relevant to your questions because I made mention of the people of East Timor and the Balkans who, up until their liberation by invading armies, actually lived in concentration camps and suffered from acts of genocide.

1.2.2002

It’s been a pleasure, I have enjoyed our conversations.

Spiritualism teaches detachment as in believing ‘I am not the body’ and that ‘who I really am really’ is a disembodied spirit. But following this spirit-ual teaching is to remain forever cut off from the magnificence and purity of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in.

Actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual and as such, the actualism method of asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is specifically designed to break free of the ingrained habit of dissociating from one’s feelings and detaching from sensual experiencing. I am not asking you to believe me, however your own on-going observations and investigations may well reveal this to be the case.

The proof for me that the ‘be here now’ preachers were full of pith and wind was that, when they realized they were God, they totally retreated from the world and made their living bludging off others who aspired to learn detachment.

Actualism is not about being in the real world because, as life-experience reveals, the real world sucks. In the real world some 6 billion human beings currently are involved in an instinctually-driven grim battle for survival. The human yearning for freedom is to seek a way of escaping from this instinctually-based illusion but this search for freedom is still well and truly stuck in the ancient fairy-tale beliefs of escaping to a spirit-ridden world – where good spirits go after ‘their body’ dies.

There are no warts such as malice and sorrow in the actual world – there is only purity and perfection. There is no anger in a tree, sadness in a rock, resentment in a coffee cup, feeling of alienation in a cloud – nor is there God in a television set. Actualism espouses abandoning the belief in an imaginary spirit world, stepping out of real world into the actual world and leaving your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong.

Reading and practicing is a good combination.

If you can’t remember having had a PCE in the past, then contemplating on what you are reading may well induce one. What I did was read deliberately looking for the differences between actualism and spiritualism and the resulting realization that everyone has got it 180 degrees will induce a PCE, because one can only fully realize that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong by being temporarily outside of the human condition.

The most direct way to induce a PCE, of course, is by practicing actualism – asking yourself, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ There will often be serendipitous opportunities occurring when you are not feeling worried, stressed, anxious, annoyed, melancholy or such, when a brief lull can occur in one’s normal ‘self’-centred perception and a sensuous appreciation of the purity and perfection of the actual world seeps in. When this happens you get to directly experience that there are in fact three worlds – an illusionary real world, a delusionary spiritual world and an actual world that is incorruptible in its perfection.

The aim of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to develop a fascination with the immediate-only business of being here. A self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when one is not busy with one’s feelings but when one brings one’s fascinated attention to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking. Whenever a PCE happens you get to directly experience the freedom from the human condition that is being freely offered on the AF website.

I have appreciated your sincerity in our communications – it is an essential attribute that will stand you in good stead in your future reading and practicing.

6.2.2002

It’s been a pleasure, I have enjoyed our conversations.

I don’t know that the planet is getting stupider, but the latest fashionable fixation called the New Age should be more rightly called the New Dark Age. The New Dark Age has seen a re-run of almost every conceivable ancient superstition, myth and legend – a return to fear-ridden imaginary worlds of good and evil spirits, Gods and Goddesses, ancient healings and esoteric medicines, divinations and prophecies, energies and auras, folk tales and legends, gurus and shamans, fairies and goblins, devils and demons, sacred sites and cosmic planes, chakras and levels of consciousness, telepathy and spiritualism, visions and entities, ESP and UFO’s, Chi Gong and Feng Shui, somas and souls, mysticism and meditation, rituals and rites, astrology and geomancy, reincarnations and past lives, karmas and dharmas and so on.

I have tried to have face-to-face conversations with New Dark Agers about their beliefs but soon gave up as I discovered that spiritualists do not like having their beliefs questioned. The difference with conversations on this list is that questioning beliefs is part and parcel of the actualism process and any emotional reactions that do occur in this process are but a sign that you are identifying with the belief – in other words, that particular belief forms a discernible affective component of your identity. While abandoning your cherished beliefs can be difficult, by doing so you end up becoming free of that part of your identity and also palpably free of the affective responses that automatically arise from the need to constantly maintain and/or defend your beliefs.

*

Spiritualism teaches detachment as in believing ‘I am not the body’ and that ‘who I really am really’ is a disembodied spirit. But following this spirit-ual teaching is to remain forever cut off from the magnificence and purity of the actual world we flesh and blood bodies live in.

Actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual and as such, the actualism method of asking ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is specifically designed to break free of the ingrained habit of dissociating from one’s feelings and detaching from sensual experiencing. I am not asking you to believe me, however your own on-going observations and investigations may well reveal this to be the case.

The actual world already delivers, and always has delivered, because it exists as an actuality. It is already, always here under our very noses, as it were. The actual world is pure and perfect in its peerless infinitude, whereas the real-world is but an illusionary ‘self’-created nightmare and the spiritual world is but a delusionary ‘self’-imagined dream.

It is my experience that even a virtual freedom from the human condition is vastly superior to suffering from the exalted state of Self-realization, God-realization, Buddha-hood or whatever other name is used.

*

Reading and practicing is a good combination.

As in most matters of any value.

And yet when it comes to the search for freedom, most people never bother to read the source material that their particular belief or faith is based on, they do not bother to recognize, let alone address any anomalies or inconsistencies in the teachings and never question why these beliefs and faiths have always failed to deliver their promises despite the fact that millions upon millions of people have arduously and diligently attempted to put them into practice. I can certainly remember how gullible I was in my spiritual years – the shamans of old demanded faith, hope, trust and unequivocal loyalty of their followers in order to silence dissent and to nip in the bud any outbreaks of questioning the teacher and the teachings. There is a vast difference between gullibly accepting the imaginary dreams of the spiritualism and sincerely investigating the down-to-this-earth pragmatism of actualism.

*

If you can’t remember having had a PCE in the past, then contemplating on what you are reading may well induce one. What I did was read deliberately looking for the differences between actualism and spiritualism and the resulting realization that everyone has got it 180 degrees will induce a PCE, because one can only fully realize that everyone has got it 180 degrees wrong by being temporarily outside of the human condition.

The most direct way to induce a PCE, of course, is by practicing actualism – asking yourself, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ There will often be serendipitous opportunities occurring when you are not feeling worried, stressed, anxious, annoyed, melancholy or such, when a brief lull can occur in one’s normal ‘self’-centred perception and a sensuous appreciation of the purity and perfection of the actual world seeps in. When this happens you get to directly experience that there are in fact three worlds – an illusionary real world, a delusionary spiritual world and an actual world that is incorruptible in its perfection.

The aim of asking oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ is to develop a fascination with the immediate-only business of being here. A self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when one is not busy with one’s feelings but when one brings one’s fascinated attention to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking. Whenever a PCE happens you get to directly experience the freedom from the human condition that is being freely offered on the AF website.

The psychological/physiological basis for desensitising to sensory stimuli – if I can paraphrase your description – is ‘you’, the psychological and psychic entity that has parasitically taken up residence inside you, the flesh and blood body that your parents named No 38. ‘You’, the thinking and feeling entity, relentlessly monitors the sensory input and continuously maintains a thinking and feeling response to it. I use the words relentless and continuously deliberately for this monitoring process is instinctual in nature – it is genetically programmed in all animal species. Subsequently whenever you touch something, there is always a ‘me’ thinking and feeling as though ‘I’ am touching something as opposed to the direct sensation of nerve ends responding to stimuli. This is what I mean by – a self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when you are not busy with ‘your’ thoughts and feelings but when you brings your ‘self’ to the very surface of the eyeballs as it were, to the very surface of the skin, to the eardrums when hearing, to the nose when smelling, to the taste buds in the mouth when eating or drinking.

By its very nature, ‘I’ cannot experience a PCE but by making the aim of ‘my’ life to become happy and harmless in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are ‘you’ are actively creating the very circumstances for a temporary experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world to occur.

And just to once again draw attention to the difference between actualism and spiritualism – you may have noticed that those who suffer from solipsism would claim there is no flesh and blood finger, (no body), no physical sensation (only affective feeling) and no material object that the finger is touching (matter is illusionary), just ing-ing happening. Solipsism is a condition that happens to those who retreat from the world of people, things and events and become so enamoured with their own thinking and feelings (ing-ing) that they become so totally ‘self’-centred and ‘self’-obsessed that they are compelled to deny the very existence of both their fellow human beings and of matter itself.

Solipsism – In philosophy, the view or theory that only the self really exists or can be known. Oxford Talking Dictionary

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I have appreciated your sincerity in our communications – it is an essential attribute that will stand you in good stead in your future reading and practicing.

I saw an interview the other day with that doyen of therapy, Woody Allen, where he was asked whether therapy had helped him in his life and even he dismissed it as being of not much use. From what he said in the interview he seems to have now slipped into a stoic resignation or a begrudging acceptance of his lot in life – a condition that is common to many men of his age.

It’s good to find out and recognize when a door is the wrong door, when a revered wisdom has obviously failed and to eventually abandon hope that any of the old ways will bring peace and happiness. I remember once saying that actualism should have a sign on the door saying ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ and by that I meant the hope that the traditional long- tried and always-failed methods would somehow, sometime, miraculously deliver the goods. When I recognized and acknowledged to myself that everything I had tried so far had failed to provide happiness and peace, I was then ready to try out something radically new.

20.2.2002

Just a comment with regard to your recent post on the topic of relationship. You wrote in response to Gary –

Gary: On the subject of my ‘relationship’ with my partner, the matter gets a bit stickier. Since my need to affiliate with other human beings in groups has greatly lessened, to the point of almost being totally absent, I have wondered at times if I transferred these feelings on to my partner and whether I am clinging to her to get these self-same needs met. I do enjoy our being together, and I look forward to our weekends and holidays together, even our simple presence together in the evening when the day is done is very enjoyable. To be honest: I do find myself clinging to her at times with feelings of ‘love’ and affection. Yet I can say that for every moment in which there is this feeling of love and affection, there are counterpoised moments when the invidious passions are in evidence: resentment, peevishness, annoyance. In short, malice. It increases my feeling that you cannot have the positive, loving emotions without having the whole instinctual package. At least, that’s the way I think of it at this point. In other words, the entire package needs to be deleted.

So, I guess where this leaves me is to say that I think the closest thing I have to a ‘normal relationship’ is my relationship with my partner. It is here that the instinctual passions of nurture and desire occur most clearly and cleanly, compared to my other everyday ‘relationships’. To sum this all up: it seems to me that a ‘relationship’ is about sharing joy and sorrow, sharing the complete pathos and movement of human emotion and human feeling. If one is freeing oneself from the Human Condition, does one need or desire relationships then? In an actual intimacy, is there any ‘relationship’ with the other that one is relating to? Is there any ‘connection’ at all, or is this entirely absent? These are just a couple of the questions that occur. Gary to Peter,

I particularly like what you have discovered because it is an experiential observation and understanding of your own feelings and not a mere intellectual understanding of someone else’s experience – and there is a world of difference between the two.

I particular remember how shocked I was when, despite years of spiritual practice, I became very angry over a trivial matter. It was as though a crack had suddenly opened up in my oh-so-righteous persona and, although it was an uncomfortable experience, it provided an invaluable insight into the hidden deep-seated passions that lay just under the surface.

If I can elaborate a bit on your observation – what normally prevents such clear observations from occurring is the human social conditioning and the feeling of righteousness is particularly common for those who have imbibed religious or spiritual conditioning. Because of these spiritual feelings, it is extremely rare to find anyone who is capable of, let alone willing to, admit that they have malicious feelings towards others. If they do admit to feeling malicious, it is almost always cloaked in some form of self-righteous justification, as in ‘it was the other’s fault’, ‘I was simply sharing my feelings’, or even ‘I was doing it for their own good’.

The other major factors that prevent such clear observations form occurring are the socially imposed feelings of guilt and shame. As children, all humans are trained to feel guilty and shameful if they think or feel wrong or evil thoughts and we subsequently learn the games of deceit and denial as a way of avoiding blame and/or punishment. Because of the tenacity of this childhood programming it is vital for an actualist to both understand and experientially observe that the feelings, emotions and passions that constantly arise are the human condition in action and not one’s personal fault.

By conducting your investigations with this understanding in mind you are conducting an investigation in a hands-on scientific down-to-earth manner, free of any moral or ethical judgements of good or bad, right or wrong. By investigating the human condition in action in you – and as ‘you’ – you also avoid the traditional spiritual trap of creating yet another identity, a superior ‘real you’ who then observes a supposedly ‘illusionary you’.

You will find this business of becoming aware of your social/spiritual persona is not a one-off understanding but an ongoing process. You will become continually aware of whenever you think you are right and the other is wrong, when you feel as though you are being good and the other is being bad. You will find that these feelings arise because of beliefs you have been taught to be universal truths and you will become fascinated as you unearth and acknowledge the facts of how ‘you’ have been socially and instinctually programmed to think and feel.

Of course, you have to be sure that this is what you want to do with your life, because once you launch yourself into this process you will never be the same again.

Again, this is one of the most crucial understandings in actualism and one that clearly separates it from all of the past failed methods to find a way to become free of malice and sorrow. The pursuit of happiness has been a long and fruitless search thus far for human beings solely because everyone has put their own happiness first and being harmless second – if being harmless gets a look in at all, that is.

Once you begin to observe in yourself the malicious element of merely pursuing your own happiness you also begin to see that it is normal behaviour within the human condition, i.e. everybody blames someone else for being the cause of their unhappiness and blaming others can only be a malicious act. And then you begin to see that this ultimately ‘self’-centred focus on ‘my’ happiness is why human beings do not, and cannot, live together in peace and harmony.

Speaking personally, it was the desire to be harmless that attracted me to begin the process of actualism and it was the desire to be harmless that has provided all of the impetus to push on beyond the limits of the measly ‘self’-centred pursuit of happiness only.

What I soon discovered in my first months of actualism was if there is going to be peace on earth between human beings then it was up to ‘me’ and it had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. This understanding can be a daunting challenge because once you let it in completely you put yourself on the spot, as it were. What ‘I’ did was take up the challenge and make becoming actually happy and harmless my primary aim in life and put everything else second. ‘I’ saw that it was the very best thing ‘I’ could do with my life. Every other challenge paled into insignificance – others could pursue security, wealth and fame if they wanted to, others could pursue immortality for their souls if they wanted to, but ‘my’ work became the real pioneering work inherent in the pursuit of an actual freedom from malice and sorrow.

I like what you have reported because it is your own observation of your own feelings, in other words it is an experiential understanding of what has been reported by Richard and the other actualists. As you would know from your own life experience, an experiential understanding based on hands-on experience is far superior to an intellectual understanding of the words of others. No amount of intellectual understanding can substitute for hands-on experience, and the only way to become free of malice and sorrow is to become aware of all of the nuances of malice and sorrow in action in your own psyche, and as your own psyche.

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Peter’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust